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On July 27, 2006, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) contacted the EPA Region 6 hotline to report an ongoing spill at the former Pointe Coupee Wood Treating Facility in New Roads, Louisiana. The spill, located at 413 Parent Street in New Roads, Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana was originally reported to the LDEQ by the owner of the grocery store located adjacent to the property on which the tank is situated.
The site is an inactive wood preserving facility situated on approximately 0.5 acre of land. The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality Inactive and Abandoned Sites Division (LDEQ-IASD) files indicate that the facility operated from 1950 to 1988 as a wood treating business. The process conducted at the site involved the placement of wood into a retort vessel and treatment with pentachlorophenol (PCP). The leaking tank is suspected to contain PCP used in this process.
The site features currently include the following: two office buildings, two lumber sheds, two aboveground storage tanks (T5 and T6), concrete pads, four 55-gallon drums (D1 to D4), a house on blocks used as a thrift store, and a retort vessel building with an attached open-walled track shed. The retort vessel building contains a 4-foot by 50-foot pressure cylinder and associated piping, two storage tanks (T1 and T2), two stream pressure cylinders (T3 and T4), and nine pails ranging in size from 1 to 5 gallons. Tanks T1, T2, T5, and T6 are steel, vertical tanks with 6,000-gallon, 500-gallon, 10,000-gallon and 2,000-gallon capacities, respectively. Tanks T1 and T5 contain brown liquid and sludge. All tanks appear to be in poor condition and have no secondary containment structures. Tanks T5 and T6 are heavily rusted and resting on poor support structures. Tank T5 is the tank from which the leak emanated.
The site is located in a mixed commercial/residential area. Two grocery stores border the site to the east and west. The site is bordered to the south by an open field and to the north by Parent Street, also known as Louisiana Highway (LA) 10. South of the open field is a residential neighborhood. Directly across Parent Street is an empty lot; although, most of the property along that road is commercially developed.
The drainage path from the site has been modified throughout the years. Historical records indicate that ditches were located along the southern and eastern borders of the site, collecting site runoff. Runoff would then flow to the north, through a culvert running under the current location of Mougeot’s grocery store and Parent Street, and then into a drainage ditch leading north to Portage Canal. The open field to the south of the site was lowland and held water most of the year. Approximately 6 to 12 inches of fill was added to ditches inside the property borders, to areas to the east and southeast of the site process areas, and to the open field to the south of the site. According to Mr. Labatut, those areas were filled 8 to 9 years ago. Currently, surface runoff water collects within the low areas of the open field to the south of the site and in the backyard of the Labatut’s grocery store to the east of the site or enters the city-maintained drainage ditches that eventually flow to the north and empty into Portage Canal.
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